What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.
You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the complexity of the world and our perception of it through art.
Shaun Tan's quote reflects on the challenges artists face in perceiving and representing reality. It suggests that even familiar objects, like a car, can seem foreign and bizarre when examined closely, illustrating how art can reveal the strangeness and beauty in the everyday world. The act of drawing becomes a journey of discovery, emphasizing that the unusual and confounding elements of life are ever-present, waiting to be explored through creativity.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the role of art in society, one might use this quote to illustrate how creativity changes our perspective.
Similar quotes
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
We encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch, and we give them the resources - and, crucially, the candid feedback - that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film.
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!
What comes first? The melody, always. It's all about singing the melodies live in my head. They go in circles. I guess I'm quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it's good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.